This section is intended to provide a background or context. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:
3GPP third generation partnership project
AP access point (such as a base station, relay node, wireless router, etc.)
BW bandwidth
CA carrier aggregation
CC component carrier
CSI channel status information
CTS clear to send
DL downlink (eNB towards UE)
DMRS demodulation reference signal
eNB E-UTRAN Node B (evolved Node B)
E-UTRAN evolved UTRAN (LTE)
IMT-A international mobile telephony-advanced
LTE long term evolution of UTRAN (E-UTRAN)
MAC medium access control (layer 2, L2)
Node B base station
PCC primary control carrier
PDCP packet data convergence protocol
PHY physical (layer 1, L1)
RB resource block
RTS request to send
SCC secondary control carrier
UE user equipment, such as a mobile station or mobile terminal
UL uplink (UE towards eNB)
UTRAN universal terrestrial radio access network
WiFi wireless local area network based on the IEEE 802.11 standard
A terminal or mobile device may simultaneously receive one or multiple component carriers (CC) depending on its capabilities. A LTE-A terminal with reception capability beyond 20 MHz can simultaneously receive transmissions on multiple component carriers. A LTE Rel-8 terminal can receive transmissions on a single component carrier only, provided that the structure of the component carrier follows the Rel-8 specifications. Moreover, it is required that LTE-A should be backwards compatible with Rel-8 LTE in the sense that a Rel-8 LTE terminal should be operable in the LTE-A system, and that a LTE-A terminal should be operable in a Rel-8 LTE system.
With further regard to carrier aggregation, what is implied is that one eNB can effectively contain more than one cell on more than one CC (frequency carrier), and the eNB can utilize one (as in E-UTRAN Rel-8) or more cells (in an aggregated manner) when assigning resources and scheduling the UE.